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Dmae Roberts talks with director Kevin Jones and actress Chantal DeGroat about August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson about to open at Portland Playhouse. Tune in for an insightful talk about this sixth production of Wilson’s American Century Cycle that opens the 7th season of Portland Playhouse. ​We’ll hear about the play as well the August Wilson Red Door Project, an organization with a mission to change the racial ecology of Portland that Jones co-founded and now runs as artistic director.

Winner of the Pulitzer, Tony, and Peabody awards when it premiered in 1990, The Piano Lesson transports us to post-Depression, Great Migration-era Pittsburgh in 1936. Boy Willie returns home with a plan to sell his family’s heirloom piano in order to buy himself a piece of land. But his sister Berniece (played by Chantal DeGroat) won’t let this storied instrument and all the memory, pain, and sacrifice it contains, leave the Charles family.

The Piano Lesson features one of the strongest female characters in Wilson’s plays and asks the profound question of what one does with family and cultural legacy. You can always here Stage & Studio at: